CASE STUDY

I’m Sue Cunningham, Chief Executive of GL Communities, and I wanted to share my organisations experiences of using Go Volunteer Glos to support the recruitment of our volunteers.

GL Communities has been working in Matson, Robinswood and White City, Podsmead and Stroud since 2010. We aim to connect residents, businesses, and services to develop thriving and aspiring communities. Our services include debt and benefit advice, employment and training support, and providing food vouchers. We have a team of 20 amazing volunteers who support us with various roles from providing advice and support, and taking part in activities such as cooking for the community, gardening, helping with ‘men’s shed’ and art groups and in our charity shop, through to our Trustees who sit on the Board.   

Having volunteers has been a huge benefit to our organisation, and it can really help the people volunteering too, for example through gaining new experiences to develop their careers. Volunteering is about trying something and seeing it if fits… we always say to people just try it and you’ll be surprised what you get back!

GL Communities has been waiting for a county-wide website like Go Volunteer Glos for a long time! Before Go Volunteer Glos, it was very difficult to find volunteers beyond our existing networks. Now we have far more reach… it helps us to connect into a really wide pool of interested people. The site itself looks fantastic – it’s got a friendly and informal feel, which we and our volunteers love.  

Sometimes we have potential volunteers approach us from the community and for various reasons we don’t have a suitable role at that time. One of the other fantastic benefits with Go Volunteer Glos is we can now help them find another volunteering role that might suit them better.  

It’s also a great organisational tool for us, the back-office features are so useful. It’s particularly good that we can have multiple administrators, so each of our project leads can manage their own applications.  

And the best news for us is we’ve already recruited two trustees through Go Volunteer Glos; finding trustees is something we’ve really struggled with in the past.